thoughtful
face, so full of gentle dignity and earnest composure, in which we
recognize the graver and loftier genius of a man worthy to hold his own
beside all but the greatest of his age. And that age was the age of
Shakespeare.

WILLIAM ROWLEY

Of all the poets and humorists who lit up the London stage for half a
century of unequalled glory, William Rowley was the most thoroughly
loyal Londoner: the most evidently and proudly mindful that he was a
citizen of no mean city. I have always thought that this must have been
the conscious or unconscious source of the strong and profound interest
which his very remarkable and original genius had the good-fortune to
evoke from the sympathies of Charles Lamb. That divine cockney, if the
word may be used--and "why in the name of glory," to borrow the phrase
of another immortal fellow-townsman, should it not be?--as a term of no
less honor than Yorkshireman or Northumbrian, Cornishman or Welshman,
has lavished upon Rowley such cordial and such manfully sympathetic
praise as would suffice to preserve and to immortalize the name of a far
lesser man and a far feebler workman in tragedy or comedy, poetry or
prose.

If Lamb had known and read the first work published by Rowley, it is
impossible to imagine that it would not have been honored by the tribute
of some passing and priceless word. Why it has never been reissued
(except in a private reprint for the Percy Society) among the many less
deserving and less interesting revivals from the apparently and not
really ephemeral literature of its day would be to me an insoluble
problem, if I were so ignorant as never to have realized the too obvious
fact that chance, pure and simple chance, guides or misguides the
intelligence, and suggests or fails to suggest, the duty of scholars and
of students who have given time and thought to such far from unimportant
or insignificant matters. "A Search for Money; or, a Quest for the
Wandering Knight Monsieur L'Argent," is not comparable with the best
pamphlets of Nash or of Dekker: a competent reader of those admirable
improvisations will at the first opening feel inclined to regard it as a
feeble and servile imitation of their quaint and obsolescent manner; but
he will soon find an original and a vigorous vein of native humor in
their comrade or their disciple. The seekers after the wandering knight,
baffled in their search on shore, are compelled to recognize the sad
fact that "the sea